“There’s a larger dwelling ahead, below that second rise, and some outbuildings. Maybe we can pay to get a shed or something over our heads.”
“If they don’t slam the shutters in our face.” Nylan paused. “Are you still sure about this feeling you had? About Lornth being a better place?”
“I still have it.” Ayrlyn wiped moisture away from her own face.
“[‘wouldn’t want to be any place that you had a bad feeling about.”
“Thank you, ser engineer.”
Nylan winced. “Sorry.”
“You should be. Again.”
The chestnut whuffed and shook her head, sending more droplets across both Nylan and Weryl.
“Nooooooooo…” said Weryl, waving his hands, and wiggling his legs, almost drumming them on the damp leather of the saddle.
“I don’t care about child psychology,” said Ayrlyn. “He knows what ‘no’ means.”
Nylan had the feeling she was right… perhaps about too many things.
They rode downhill and then back up the low rise to the holding, centered on a plaster-sided house that had once been white, but now appeared gray. A line of gray smoke swirled from the stone chimney.
“Hello… the house!” called Nylan.
“Hello the house?” asked Ayrlyn.
“What else could you say? Welcome, some angels?” Nylan shifted his weight in the saddle, wondering just how chafed he was going to be from riding in damp trousers.
A man with a red and gray beard opened the door and stepped onto the narrow porch. The rain rolling off the roof put a thin curtain of water between him and the angels.
“What ye be wanting?” His eyes went to Ayrlyn, then to Weryl. “Wet travel for a child.”
“We had hoped you might have a dry place where we could stay,” said Nylan.
“I be no inn,” said the man. “Herder in a hard land.”
“We’re not asking for charity,” Nylan said. “Nor even that you open your house-just a dry shed.”
The man shrugged, then looked at Nylan intently. “You one of those angels?”
“I’ve been called that, but I’m a man who’s had to travel with his son, and we’re wet. I can offer you some coppers for a dry place-a shed, a barn.”
“I don’t know.” The herder looked at Weryl, who looked back, somber-faced. “I suppose you would not harm the hay shed, and you could put the mounts in the animal shed. They be not nipping, do they?”
“They never have yet.”
“Fine.” The red-bearded herder looked at Weryl again.
“You get settled, and you can pay as you think is fit. A moment-need to get a waterproof.”
When he ducked back into the house, Ayrlyn looked at Nylan. The healer looked back, raising her eyebrows.
The smith shrugged.
“Follow me.” The herder stepped down onto the damp ground and into the rain. The angels followed him around the dwelling to a narrow structure, unpainted wood darkened by the dampness. The herder opened the door, little more than three planks fastened to two boards. “Hay shed.” He pointed to a three-walled shed with a slanted roof. “Animals there. Plenty of room. Flock’s up in the lower pasture. Like the rain.”
Nylan dismounted and fumbled out three coppers. “Thank you.”
The herder took the coins. “Well is there.” He pointed to the stones mortared into a circular form midway between his house and the hay shed. Then, with a quick look at Weryl, he nodded, turned, and trudged back through the rain, now falling even more heavily.
Both Nylan and Ayrlyn were soaked by the time they had unsaddled the mounts and carried their gear, and Weryl, to the hay shed. The shed was still half filled with hay, stacked in small circular bales bound with straw braids. Dust swirled around them in the gusting winds that entered with them, despite the dampness of the air.
“At least, it has plank floors. And it’s dry.” Ayrlyn closed the plank door, leaving them in the gloom that was not too dark for Ayrlyn, nor any bother for Nylan, not with his night vision.
“Lots of splinters,” added Nylan, pulling one from his finger. “Be careful when you put down things.” He rubbed his nose, once, twice, then sneezed.
“Daaa-daaa!” Weryl windmilled his arms in response to the sneeze.
“You can drape the bedrolls over that beam there for a while. It’s dry enough.”
Nylan rubbed his nose again, thisx time holding back the sneeze, and then extracted Weryl from the carrypak, and then his son from soaking wet clothes. Once he had Weryl in a dry outfit, he straightened and looked to the bedrolls.
“I’ll get some water, and hope it’s not too bad. Trying to separate the chaos from it-I get tired.” Ayrlyn wiped more water from her forehead as she looked at the door, almost as if she dreaded going into the rain.
Weryl sat in a pile of hay, and tried to chew on one of the pale yellow-brown stalks.
As he eased the second bedroll over the thick timber, Nylan looked from Ayrlyn to his son. “I’ll get the water. I can do that. It’s better than getting sick. You watch our friend, and make sure he doesn’t eat too much straw.”
The healer smiled faintly. “I need to get out of these clothes.”
Nylan smiled. “I hope you do.”
“You’re impossible. You were impossible when you were wounded.”
“I’ll get the water.” He eased open the door and hurried toward the well. Each impact of his boots sent mud flying.
After lifting the bucket, he took a deep breath and concentrated, trying to use the dark lines of force to separate out the unseen reddish-whiteness that was chaos-or infection- and trying not to think about the apparent engineering impossibility of what he did.
“Just think about different laws… different laws, that’s all.”
The water didn’t look that different when he poured it into the two bottles, except marginally clearer.
He headed back to the hay shed, closing the door behind him and then setting both water bottles on the plank floor. “The water wasn’t too bad.”
“Good.” Ayrlyn, wearing only a dry shirt extracted from her pack, looked out the door before closing it. “It’s raining hard.”
“I’d say so.” Nylan wiped water from his hair and face, then stripped off his shirt and walked to the corner where he wrung out a stream of liquid. Then he hung his shirt next to Ayrlyn’s damp clothes. He pulled off his boots and did the same with the rest of his clothing, then extracted a shirt and trousers that were only marginally damp.
“Nice figure,” commented Ayrlyn.
“I notice you changed while I was getting water. That wasn’t fair.”
“Some things aren’t.” Ayrlyn spread some straw on the planks beside Weryl and eased herself down, very carefully.
Weryl reached for her, and she picked him up. “In a moment. Daddy will get out the food.”
Nylan pulled on the trousers. Then he emptied the food pack, taking out the last section of the yellow brick cheese that left an aftertaste of goats or… something, four travel biscuits, and three strips of dried venison. “Not much left to eat.” He sat on the straw between Weryl and Ayrlyn. “We need more food.”
“We should reach Lornth tomorrow.”
“Will anyone sell us food?” He broke off a section of biscuit and handed it to the silver-haired boy.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see.” Ayrlyn sliced two thin slivers of the yellow cheese and handed one to Weryl, the second to Nylan. She cut another for herself.
“Tomorrow, let’s see if we can buy anything from the herder. All he can say is no.”
“He won’t if he can spare it,” Ayrlyn prophesied. “Hard coin is too hard to come by. It always is for agricultural types.”
“I hope you’re right.”
They ate silently for a time. After that, in between chasing Weryl around the hay shed, Nylan packed away the remnants, remnants that were getting slimmer and slimmer. He paused. “It’s still raining.”
�
�I’m not tired… and neither is our little friend.”
“Why don’t you sing something,” Nylan suggested, “something that you’d like.”
“Do you think our friend would stand still long enough?”
“He’s tired, but not sleepy.”
“I’ll try.” Ayrlyn walked over to the lutar case and extracted the instrument before sitting on one of the hay bales.
Nylan picked up Weryl and sat on another bale across from her.
At the first sound of her fingers tuning, Weryl’s eyes flicked toward the singer. “Ooooo…”
“I’m not that good, Weryl, but I appreciate the flattery.” Her fingers crossed the strings. “How about something cheerful?”
“Fine with me,” Nylan said, “and with Weryl, I’d guess.” Ayrlyn cleared her throat and began.
“When I was single, I looked at the skies.
Now I’ve a consort, I listen to lies,
lies about horses that speak in the darks,
lies about cats and theories of quarks…“
“Aaaalaaan… daa, daaa,” said Weryl as she finished the tune.
“I think that translates as ‘more.’ ” Nylan laughed.
“Well… we’ll give him a song about you.”
“Not that one.”
“Why not?”
“It’s awful.”
“You’ll just have to get used to it.” The healer grinned in the gloom, and her flame hair glittered with a light of its own.
“Oh, Nylan was a smith, and a mighty mage was he.
With lightning hammer and an anvil of night forged he,
From the Westhorns tall came the blades and bows of the night.
Their lightning edges gave the angels forever the height…
“Oh, Nylan was a mage, and a mighty smith was he.
With rock from the heights and a lightning blade built he.
On the Westhorns tall stands a tower of blackest stone,
And it holds back the winter’s snows and storms all alone…“
“All right, all right,” said Nylan as he picked up Weryl and began to rock the child. “Something softer?”
“You don’t mind the Sybran song?” He shook his head.
“When the snow drops on the stone
When the wind song’s all alone
When the ice swords form in twain,
Sing of the hearths where we’ve lain…“
Midway through the second stanza, Weryl lurched in Nylan’s arms, his fingers grasping, and for a moment, Nylan saw the chubby fingers actually touch the silvered note that hung in the gloom.
The smith blinked, and only silvered dust motes shimmered in the air-and vanished.
The child was oddly silent, an enigmatic smile across his lips.
Ayrlyn glanced toward Nylan. “He saw the notes.”
“We saw the notes. Because of him?”
She shook her head. “Did we ever look?”
The question bothered Nylan. Where else had he failed to look? How much else was there that he had not seen because he had not realized it could be possible?
Ayrlyn’s fingers flicked across the strings, and Weryl settled back as Nylan rocked him and the singer hummed gently.
Outside, the rain drummed on the shed roof.
XXXV
TO THE LEFT of the highway, to the north beyond the flatter grasslands where grazed the herds of the Lord of Cyador, lay the grass hills, green enough in the winter, but brown by late spring, and sere and dusty by summer.
At times, Majer Piataphi could glimpse those hills, hills similar to those through which he must lead his force once they reached the terminus of the Great North Highway in Syadtar on the next day.
The wind that ruffled his hair was warm and far drier than the moist breezes that made Cyad and Fyrad so comfortable. He stood in the white saddle to stretch his legs and looked ahead to the white and green banners of the van.
A single steamwagon passed, its trailers loaded with sealed barrels, hugging the north shoulder of the highway, headed west toward distant Cyad.
“I wish we were done and headed in that direction,” said Miatorphi. “There’s no honor in defeating barbarians.”
“We have to defeat them and keep them defeated before we need concern ourselves about honor,” answered the majer.
A messenger galloped up. “Majer!”
“What is it?” Piataphi eased his mount around Captain Azarphi’s horse.
“Serjeant Funssa-he wants you to know that steamwagon seven is leaking, and that he has no more spare fittings.”
“Watch the van, Miatorphi,” ordered the majer. “I need to find out what seven’s cargo is. They may need to shift things.” He turned his mount westward and rode back toward the steamwagons that followed the first three divisions of Mirror Lancers.
“If it’s not one thing with those damned wagons…” murmured Miatorphi to Azarphi.
“They carry a lot, though.”
“When they work. Half the time they don’t, and it’s getting worse. Fewer of them, too. Once there were hundreds. Now… what? They’ve got a score that really work, and they run them all the time, and even more break down. Give me a good horse team any day.”
The two captains looked to the banners that led the Cyadoran force. Neither glanced back to the trails of smoke that marked the steamwagons.
XXXVI
HIGH HAZY CLOUDS swirled slowly across the sky as the three horses plodded along the rutted clay road and northward toward Lornth. Nylan glanced to the east, but the trees on the hills above the scrubby meadow were deciduous, or what passed for it on this world, and they had, he suspected, finally left the thorny ironwoods behind.
“The herder’s cheese wasn’t bad,” the smith said.
“For three coppers, it shouldn’t be. The loaf of bread was better, and cheaper.”
“We’ve got plenty of the cheese left.”
In the swale to the left of the road, on a bluff overlooking the river were a deserted dwelling and a shed with a half-collapsed roof. Beyond the bluff and river to the west were neatly fenced and tilled plots of ground, regular in outline.
“Definitely on the wrong side of the sky,” mused Nylan.
“This side of the river might be better. We haven’t gotten the best reception in prosperous areas, and the west side is more prosperous. Even that rider this morning circled around us. He wore purple.”
“Purple-that means he’s something in Lornth. Some sort of lord or functionary or messenger. He had a sour look in his face. Are they all like that because those that have more dislike change? And we’ve brought change?”
“It could be, but I really don’t know.” Ayrlyn stood in her stirrups and peeled her damp trousers away from her body. “Don’t laugh.”
“I wasn’t even thinking of it.” Nylan made a show of studying the road, then frowned and glanced down it. “It looks like it barely rained here. The top of the ground is damp, but it’s merely wetted the dust, and the hillside ahead looks dry.”
“It doesn’t rain everywhere.”
“Only where we are. It’s not as though we have that much in the way of clothing. Those leathers were like iron this morning.”
“You didn’t have to wear that pair.”
“If I didn’t, I’d never get into them again.”
“Complain, complain,” Ayrlyn chided him.
“You were the one just peeling your trousers away from your skin.”
“They never dried, and my saddlebags leaked. The other set got even wetter.”
“Someone’s riding fast.” Nylan pointed toward the line of dust leading from the valley into which the road carried them. Above the crest of the second and lower hill to the right, he could see what appeared to be a stone tower, and the top of several white-faced buildings. “You think that’s Lornth?”
“I don’t know what else it could be, but I’ve never been there.”
Halfway down the hill, the dust-creating riders appeared over
the crest of the next rise, trotting quickly toward the travelers.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that they were after us.”
“That rider in purple this morning?” suggested Ayrlyn.
“A Lornian messenger, you think?” Nylan laughed wryly. “He must have been, and he’s reported that two fearsome angels are on their way to assault mighty Lornth.”
“You could.”
“Not without the laser, and there’s nothing left of it.”
“I still wonder about how much was the laser, and how much was you.”
So did Nylan, but it wasn’t exactly the time to get into theoretical order engineering.
Out of the dust came a full squad of armsmen in the dark purple of Lornth, darker than that of Gallos.
“They don’t look exactly friendly,” Nylan observed, his hands going to one blade and then the other to check their readiness. The bow he left alone, wrapped and tied behind his saddle, because at longer ranges his aim was less than accurate.
“Keep riding,” suggested Ayrlyn.
Nylan kept riding, but his eyes measured the armsmen, what looked to be a full squad led by a brown-haired and brown-bearded man with broad shoulders that seemed to burst out of his tunic. He wore no breastplate, and a small round shield remained fastened to his saddle, shielding his right knee.
The Lornians formed a wall across the road, dust settling around the legs of their mounts.
“Halt, angels!”
The angels reined up to avoid riding into the Lornian armsmen.
“With the hair of the sky demons, you must be the dark ones.” The armsman’s hand lifted as though to draw the huge blade in his shoulder harness. His eyes centered on Nylan.
“We’re travelers.” Nylan’s hand rested on the black blade he had forged so far behind them, but he did not show steel.
“Da!” offered Weryl. “Da!”
Great help, reflected the smith.
“We come to Lornth in peace.” On the mare beside Nylan, Ayrlyn’s fingers touched the hilt of her blade as well.
The Chaos Balance Page 17
